Free Online Course in Ecolinguistics

Description: Arran Stibbe presenting the online course at the CLADES Symposium, May 2025. Author: Maria Pilar Uribe S.

The Search for New Stories to Live By is a free online course in econarrative and ethical leadership, which invites participants to explore how stories shape our lives, societies, and futures. It equips you with the tools to question dominant narratives of inequality and ecological destruction, and to imagine and communicate new stories that foster ethical leadership and sustainable ways of living.

Arran Stibbe, professor of narrative ecology at the University of Gloucestershire and creator of the course, explains that this is a course designed for anyone who recognises society’s trajectory towards collapse under growing inequality and environmental destruction, and who seeks change at the only level that can truly make a difference: finding new stories to live by.

“We define ethical leadership as shaping how others perceive themselves and the society around them based on an ecological vision. We can all be ethical leaders, whether leading our lives, our families, our communities, our companies, or our countries. All we need is a clear ethical vision, critical awareness of the stories that underpin our unsustainable society, the ability to seek out new stories to live by, and to communicate those stories in inspiring ways.”

Arran Stibbe

The course focuses on the narratives used by ethical leaders across diverse fields. These include community elders, writers, poets, activists, campaigners, scientists and politicians. All of them are storytellers in one way or another. By examining the stories they tell and how they tell them, the course seeks out ways of imagining a radically different society and bringing that society into being.

The course was created by Stibbe based on his book “Econarrative: Ethics, Ecology and the Search for New Stories to Live By” (2024, Bloomsbury). It was developed in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Gloucestershire and an international team as part of the CLADES project, which is currently working on adapting the course into Spanish and Portuguese, so more news will follow soon.

For now, the complete course is available in English here.